Recording of Webinar on Australian Economy

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The webi­nar organ­ised by Phil Dob­bie for BTNet went over very well this morn­ing, with about 80 atten­dees and a live­ly dis­cus­sion medi­at­ed by Phil. Unfor­tu­nate­ly a pow­er out­age meant that GoToMeet­ing’s record­ing of the pre­sen­ta­tion only com­menced half way through, so to make amends Phil and I re-record­ed it this after­noon. We lost some of the inter­ac­tiv­i­ty, but the infor­ma­tion comes through very well in this for­mat.

To see this re-record­ing, please click on either of the fol­low­ing links:

Phil Dob­bie’s BTNet page “Aussie Rules”; or

A direct link to GoToMeet­ing.

You have to reg­is­ter with GoToMeet­ing to see the record­ing, but it’s well worth it. I found the medi­um and the soft­ware so effec­tive that I plan to use it here–or pos­si­bly on the Cen­tre for Eco­nom­ic Sta­bil­i­ty when that’s up and running–as a way of giv­ing reg­u­lar web lec­tures.

I used this Pow­er­Point slideshow (this is the PDF), and these Excel work­sheets to illus­trate one of the basic points, that it’s not just the lev­el of debt, or its rate of change that mat­ters, but the rate of change of the rate of change of debt: you can have a reces­sion sim­ply because the rate of change of debt slows down–even if debt is still growing–and a boom because the rate of decline of debt slows down–even if debt is falling. The files here are:

• A basic exam­ple (with a “Goldilocks” econ­o­my in which GDP is unaf­fect­ed by the change of Debt–thanks to blog mem­ber bb who first devel­oped an exam­ple like this in the dis­cus­sion on this blog);
• The US in the 1930s
• The US now
• Aus­tralia now

On anoth­er note, I am get­ting clos­er to for­mal­ly declar­ing the Cen­tre for Eco­nom­ic Sta­bil­i­ty open for busi­ness. We have formed an Non-Prof­it Asso­ci­a­tion, it is now reg­is­tered for tax exemp­tion as a char­i­ta­ble research insti­tu­tion, and short­ly we’ll also be reg­is­tered to offer tax-deductibil­i­ty for dona­tions. Once that last step is in place I will try to move a lot of the activ­i­ty across to that organ­i­sa­tion, and I’ll also put out a call for mem­ber­ship at the rate (decid­ed by the orig­i­nal meet­ing of the Asso­ci­a­tion) of A$100 p.a. for those with wage or oth­er full-time income, and A$25 p.a. for oth­ers.

I hope that a rea­son­able pro­por­tion of the now almost 6,000 mem­bers of this blog will sign up. The ambi­tion of the Cen­tre is to enable the non-ortho­dox research that I do into mon­e­tary dynam­ics to be devel­oped more effec­tive­ly, and for the Cen­tre to become an empir­i­cal­ly based alter­na­tive to the rather ide­o­log­i­cal­ly focused “think tanks” (“opin­ion tanks”?) that tend to dom­i­nate the pub­lic dis­course on eco­nom­ics today.